Deleuze and the Animal
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DELEUZE CONNECTIONS Series Editor: Ian Buchanan DELEUZE CONNECTIONS ‘This book offers us a variety of perspectives both on the animals that we are, and on the animals that we will never be able to know or to become. It is a timely reminder of the Deleuze many processes and relations linking us to the “buzzing, blooming confusion” around us.’ Steven Shaviro, Wayne State University Deleuze and Explores the relationship between Deleuze and the concept of and the the animal in philosophy, aesthetics and ethics This is the first volume to address the animal in Deleuze’s work, despite becoming-animal the Animal being a key concept for Deleuze and Guattari. It shows the ambiguous idea of the animal as human and nonhuman life infiltrating all of Deleuze’s work. Animal In these 16 chapters Deleuze’s entire oeuvre is used in analysing television, film, music, art, drunkenness, mourning, virtual technology, protest, activism, animal rights and abolition. Each chapter questions the premise of the animal and critiques the centrality of the human. This collection creates new questions about what the age of the anthropocene means by Edited by Colin Gardner and Patricia MacCormack ‘animal’ and analyses and explores examples of the unclear boundaries between human and animal. Colin Gardner is Professor of Critical Theory and Integrative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Patricia MacCormack is Professor of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University. Cover design: riverdesign.co.uk ISBN 978-1-4744-2274-1 Edinburgh 9781474 422741 Edited by Colin Gardner and Patricia MacCormack Deleuze and the Animal Deleuze Connections ‘It is not the elements or the sets which define the multiplicity. What defines it is the AND, as something which has its place between the elements or between the sets. AND, AND, AND – stammering.’ Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues General Editor Ian Buchanan Editorial Advisory Board Keith Ansell-Pearson Gregg Lambert Rosi Braidotti Adrian Parr Claire Colebrook Paul Patton Tom Conley Patricia Pisters Titles Available in the Series Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (eds), Deleuze and Feminist Theory Ian Buchanan and John Marks (eds), Deleuze and Literature Mark Bonta and John Protevi (eds), Deleuze and Geophilosophy Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swiboda (eds), Deleuze and Music Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert (eds), Deleuze and Space Martin Fuglsang and Bent Meier Sørensen (eds), Deleuze and the Social Ian Buchanan and Adrian Parr (eds), Deleuze and the Contemporary World Constantin V. Boundas (ed.), Deleuze and Philosophy Ian Buchanan and Nicholas Thoburn (eds), Deleuze and Politics Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr (eds), Deleuze and Queer Theory Jeffrey A. Bell and Claire Colebrook (eds), Deleuze and History Laura Cull (ed.), Deleuze and Performance Mark Poster and David Savat (eds), Deleuze and New Technology Simone Bignall and Paul Patton (eds), Deleuze and the Postcolonial Stephen Zepke and Simon O’Sullivan (eds), Deleuze and Contemporary Art Laura Guillaume and Joe Hughes (eds), Deleuze and the Body Daniel W. Smith and Nathan Jun (eds), Deleuze and Ethics Frida Beckman (ed.), Deleuze and Sex David Martin-Jones and William Brown (eds), Deleuze and Film Laurent de Sutter and Kyle McGee (eds), Deleuze and Law Arun Saldanha and Jason Michael Adams (eds), Deleuze and Race Rebecca Coleman and Jessica Ringrose (eds), Deleuze and Research Methodologies Inna Semetsky and Diana Masny (eds), Deleuze and Education Hélène Frichot and Stephen Loo (eds), Deleuze and Architecture Betti Marenko and Jamie Brassett (eds), Deleuze and Design Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson and Jonathan Metzger (eds), Deleuze and the City Colin Gardner and Patricia MacCormack (eds), Deleuze and the Animal Visit the Deleuze Connections website at www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/delco Deleuze and the Animal Edited by Colin Gardner and Patricia MacCormack For Jane and Spiffy Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Colin Gardner and Patricia MacCormack, 2017 © the chapters their several authors, 2017 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10.5/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 2273 4 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 2275 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 2274 1 (paperback) ISBN 978 1 4744 2276 5 (epub) The right of Colin Gardner and Patricia MacCormack to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 Colin Gardner and Patricia MacCormack Part I Undoing Anthropocentrism: Becoming-Animal and the Nonhuman 1 Ahuman Abolition 25 Patricia MacCormack 2 Brutal Thoughts: Laruelle and Deleuze on Human Animal Stupidity 37 John Ó Maoilearca 3 The Oedipal Animal? Companion Species and Becoming 52 Joanna Bednarek Part II Vectors of Becoming-Imperceptible: The Multiplicity of the Pack 4 Louis Malle’s Kleistian War Machine: Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Woman, Becoming-Imperceptible in Black Moon (1975) 77 Colin Gardner 5 Ant and Empire: Myrmetic Writing, Simulation and the Problem of Reciprocal Becomings 99 Zach Horton 6 Music-Becoming-Animal in Works by Grisey, Aperghis and Levinas 122 Edward Campbell vi Contents 7 Un/Becoming Claude Cahun: Zigzagging in a Pack 140 renée c. hoogland Part III Animal Politics, Animal Deaths: Transversal Connectivities and the Creation of an Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm 8 Bridging Bateson, Deleuze and Guattari Through Metamodelisation: What Brian Massumi Can Teach Us About Animal Politics 157 Colin Gardner 9 Becoming-shewolf and the Ethics of Solidarity in Once Upon a Time: Feminist and Posthumanist Re-assembling of Little Red Riding Hood 176 Nur Ozgenalp 10 Hannibal aux aguets: On the Lookout for New Rencontres 197 Charles J. Stivale 11 Mister V and the Unmournable Animal Death 228 Laurence A. Rickels Part IV Animal Re-territorialisations in Art and Cinema 12 Meditation on the Animal and the Work of Art 255 Gregg Lambert 13 Becoming-Animal Cinema Narrative 266 Dennis Rothermel 14 Deleuze and Roxy: The Time of the Intolerable and Godard’s Adieu au langage 275 Ronald Bogue Part V Transverse Animalities: Ecosophical Becomings 15 Drinking Animals: Sobriety, Intoxication and Interspecies Assemblages 295 Gary Genosko 16 Becoming-Wolf: From Wolfman to the Tree Huggers of Turkey 310 Serazer Pekerman Notes on Contributors 325 Index 329 Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank the contributors for their patience, their imagination and their fascinating lines of flight in expanding the animal without subsuming the nonhuman. We would also like to thank Carol Macdonald at EUP. Special thanks to renée c. hoogland for her kind per- mission to expand an earlier version of Chapter 8 from its original form as a book review for Wayne State University’s Criticism journal. This book was collated with inspiration from all the tireless activists, from Jane, from Spiffy, from Louise Gardner and from James Fowler, and in memory of Nicky, Charlotte and Lizzie. Introduction Colin Gardner and Patricia MacCormack In ‘Your Special “Desiring Machines”: What Are They?’, a brief report on Pierre Benichou’s 1970s inquiry into masochism, Gilles Deleuze para phrases Karl Marx, stating: ‘Your particular desiring machines: what are they? In a difficult and beautiful text Marx calls for the neces- sity to think human sexuality not only as a relation between the human sexes, masculine and feminine, but as a relation “between human sex and non-human sex”. He was clearly not thinking of animals, but of what is non-human in human sexuality: the machines of desire’ (Deleuze 2004: 243). Similarly, in the final lines of What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari emphasise that philosophy needs non-philosophy, science needs non-science and art needs non-art (1994: 218). These ideas express an antithesis within a thesis, the alterity of difference within sameness that is expanded upon in Difference and Repetition and Deleuze’s work on both Bergson and Spinoza. The ideas share an antagonism towards signifying structures which create binaries and attach values to the sub- jectification of any groups, by gender, race and particularly species, while testifying to the inherent unlikeness of anything within itself that is its own internal difference for itself – even within the repetition of its behaviours. Any claim towards a thing’s own ‘thingness’ is tactical. When a thing is named by another, the affects of power are foregrounded and the capacity for the named being to be able to express itself freely is dimin- ished because the other’s difference exists now only in isomorphic rela- tion with the one who names, the one who evaluates and signifies. For humans this can result, as A Thousand Plateaus tells us, in being depraved, deviant or a tramp (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 159). For minoritarians who were never signified enough to resist from an equal standing, gender, race, sexuality, ability and so forth already reduce us to ‘different to’ without our difference being a positive haecceity. 2 Colin Gardner and Patricia MacCormack The logic of signification, even of apparent difference, if it operates by the organising principles Deleuze and Guattari critique, is inherently anthropomorphic. Creating a relation of knowledge as a relation of comparison forms a monodirectional mode of apprehension that both imposes meaning upon the other and diminishes the other’s freedom, which Spinoza would critique as negative ethics.